He professes to be shy, and is evidently incapable of small talk, but something about his enthusiasm (“the engine that drives the universe,” he notes) elicits answers, some improbable, most (at least those he records) detailed and shrewd. Marius Kociejowski, the man who stood before her, is one of life’s great questioners. The soul, then, of which Naples? Who could think of locating so elusive an aspect of a place built on such deep yet never fully buried layers of history, myth, culture, memory? What sort of dreamer enters a shop selling Pompeian-themed mouse pads to announce this quixotic goal? The circumstances would be ridiculous, except for the fact that the seasoned Neapolitan woman replied, as though she were a Sibyl in a cave and had been awaiting her questioner for centuries, “I am the soul of Naples,” and went on to prove her statement at least partly true. Even now, Neapolitans differ sharply on what their central commercial street should be called. And yet for many Neapolitans the idea of being governed from Rome was apparently as abhorrent as Spanish dominion: the name Via Roma aroused so much resentment that, in the nineteen-eighties, the city brought the old Spanish name back into official use. Named Via Toledo by the Spanish, the street became Via Roma three centuries later, when Naples, at last free of a series of foreign overlords, joined a unified Italy. (There was a Greek settlement there before the Parthenon was built.) Today, that grid runs into a thoroughfare cut by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, when the Kingdom of Naples was under their imperial control. The building, named Palazzo del Panormita, for an obscure fifteenth-century author of erotic Latin epigrams, stands near a small piazza named for the River Nile, recalling the Egyptian traders who once lived in a mini-quarter within the city center’s ancient Greek grid. One day a few years ago, an Englishman walked into a tourist shop on the ground floor of a Neapolitan palazzo and told a woman he encountered there that he was searching for the soul of Naples.

Neapolitan quartet